actor

Eddie Antar, the man at the heart of the Crazy Eddie fraud scandal, has never really told his side of the story. He appeared briefly on a cable talk show with his cousin, Sam, a couple of years ago, but said little other than tacitly forgiving his former CFO for turning government witness in the case that sent Eddie and some other relatives to jail.

Los Angeles — Israel’s half-century jinx at the Oscars continued and three Jewish-themed films were passed over, but “The Jew Hunter” took home an award.

The Israeli entry “Ajami,” a gritty film about the Jewish-Arab tensions in the mixed quarter of Jaffa, lost out Sunday for best foreign language film at the Academy Awards to Argentina’s entry, “The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos),” directed by Juan José Campanell.

Pity poor Zeno, tormented by his weakness for cigarettes, guilt about his mistress and unresolved tensions with his father. At his psychoanalyst’s suggestion, Zeno writes his memoirs, but the result is the imperfect recollection of an intelligent man blindsided by swirling desires and frozen by inhibitions.

Zeno, the prematurely aged protagonist of Italian Jewish writer Italo Svevo’s comic masterpiece “Confessions of Zeno,” deeply resonated with William Kentridge when he first read the book in college.

Roman Polanski's latest feature film is a dramatic account of one man's survival in wartime Warsaw. "The Pianist," which opens Dec. 27, is also a documentary in at least one respect: its star, Adrien Brody, nearly starved himself to portray the Jewish musician and composer Wladyslaw Szpilman, shedding some 30 pounds from his already slender frame as filming progressed.

The interviews were going on back-to-back and side-by-side. In one closet-size office at a public relations firm on Seventh Avenue, the Israeli actor Oren Rehany talked about his film debut in “The Holy Land,” which opens Friday at the Angelika Film Center in Manhattan. Next door, Rehany’s co-star Tchelet Semel described the challenges of portraying a Russian prostitute when she is neither. One office over it was Saul Stein, slimmed down from his role as the burly American bar owner, Mike, but still exhibiting the character’s gravely voice and toothy grin.

In the cultural history of the second half of the 20th century, few figures — and no Jews — are more influential or pivotal than Bob Dylan.

No other artist bestrides so many trends and streams of Americana; Dylan merges folk, blues, gospel, country, rock and modernist poetry (with strong ties to the Symbolists and Surrealists). And in his relentless shape-shifting and self-reinvention he is an archetype for the age of mass communications.

It’s probably just a coincidence that the blue-skinned, endangered aliens from the planet Pandora in the mega-hit “Avatar” are called the Na’vi, which is Hebrew for prophet. It couldn’t be that non-Jewish writer and director James Cameron took the term deliberately to make a point that in these victimized, ultimately triumphant underdogs we were to see a glimpse of some conflict in the offing. Could it?

Probably not. But it is one of the things to ponder about a movie that borrows so much of its essence, while leaving so much to interpretation.

I’ve waited a week or so to write this, mostly because of my disinclination to write things that people will read and respond to by saying “Oh, well, he’s a rabbi, what do you expect?” I don’t at all like when people say things like that. It makes it sound like I- and all rabbis- are somehow less than human, that we don’t know or understand what it means to live in the real world.

But now, having waited, I have to let it out. Does anyone out there in public service still view fidelity within marriage as an active concept?